Did they not to her breast their filial earth
entrust?
Byron
In Santa Croce's[431] holy precincts lie[15. H. ]
Ashes which make it holier, dust which is
Even in itself an immortality,
Though there were nothing save the past, and this,
The particle of those sublimities
Which have relapsed to chaos:--here repose
Angelo's--Alfieri's[432] bones--and his,[16. H. ]
The starry Galileo, with his woes;
Here Machiavelli's earth returned to whence it rose. [17. H. ]
LV.
These are four minds, which, like the elements,
Might furnish forth creation:--Italy! [mv]
Time, which hath wronged thee with ten thousand rents
Of thine imperial garment, shall deny[mw]
And hath denied, to every other sky,
Spirits which soar from ruin:--thy Decay
Is still impregnate with divinity,
Which gilds it with revivifying ray;
Such as the great of yore, Canova[433] is to-day.
LVI.
But where repose the all Etruscan three--
Dante, and Petrarch, and, scarce less than they,
The Bard of Prose, creative Spirit! he[mx]
Of the Hundred Tales of Love--where did they lay
Their bones, distinguished from our common clay
In death as life? Are they resolved to dust,
And have their Country's Marbles nought to say?
Could not her quarries furnish forth one bust?
Did they not to her breast their filial earth entrust?
LVII.
Ungrateful Florence! Dante sleeps afar,[434][18. H. ]
Like Scipio buried by the upbraiding shore:[435][19. H. ]
Thy factions, in their worse than civil war,[436]
Proscribed the Bard whose name for evermore
Their children's children would in vain adore
With the remorse of ages; and the crown[437][20. H. ]
Which Petrarch's laureate brow supremely wore,
Upon a far and foreign soil had grown,
His Life, his Fame, his Grave, though rifled--not thine own. [438]
LVIII.
Boccaccio[439] to his parent earth bequeathed[my][21. H. ]
His dust,--and lies it not her Great among,
With many a sweet and solemn requiem breathed
O'er him who formed the Tuscan's siren tongue? [440]
That music in itself, whose sounds are song,
The poetry of speech? No;--even his tomb
Uptorn, must bear the hyaena bigot's wrong,
No more amidst the meaner dead find room,
Nor claim a passing sigh, because it told for _whom!
